Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Almost everything about Piotr Anderszewski's Wigmore Hall recital pleased, intrigued and even thrilled – except, perhaps, the order of the works. The Polish-born pianist opened with his selection of a dozen of Brahms’s late solo pieces, from the Op. 116 to 119 sets, and returned after the interval with the thunderous heavy cavalry of Beethoven’s final sonata, Op. 111. Compare, and contrast, the supreme leave-takings of both poets of the piano.Now, Anderszewski’s arrangement and performance of the Brahms works – several of them far from “miniatures” – lends them a dramatic and architectural Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The BBC NOW called this concert Echoes of France, which was both an understatement and a partial misnomer. Cardiff’s St David’s Hall being currently out of action, the orchestra is playing its regular concerts in the much smaller Hoddinott Hall, but with no concession to the acoustical trivia of decibels, balance and blend. Misnomer? We heard Ravel and Chausson - French certainly - but Sibelius’s Pelleas and Melisande incidental music is French only in the language of the play, which is by the Belgian Maeterlinck. It’s strange how that play captivated composers on either side of the year Read more ...
Jon Turney
Two centuries ago, New York City was a tangled collection of streets on the narrowing southern end of Manhattan island. Expansion pointed only one way, and in 1807 a three-person team proposed it be organised on a grid. They sketched ranks of rectangular city blocks reaching eight miles north, up to 155th street. And with a few alterations of detail – Central Park did not appear on their map – present-day New York displays exactly that rectilinear array.That satisfying shift from idea to reality makes the New York Commissioners’ plan “the most courageous act of prediction in Western Read more ...
James Saynor
Cinema has a deep distrust of the devout. Even though many movie types are tied up in all sorts of personal spiritual pursuits, organised religion often gets a rough ride in Hollywood and beyond. Lately, though, characters of faith have been getting better PR. In the recent Argentine film Belén, the protagonist – a battler against abortion injustice – nods repeatedly to God. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery endorses the deep grace of a young priest as virtually its controlling idea, while even Avatar: Fire and Ash has its own woo-woo supreme being.And now there’s The Testament of Ann Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Famously Handel and Bach never met, despite being born in the same year in the same country. So it was fun to see the programme for the English Concert’s delightful, vivacious performance in St George's Hanover Square playfully pit the two composers against each other by presenting works that they both composed in their thirties.When he wrote his Chandos Anthems, the still relatively fresh-faced Handel was working for the fiercely ambitious James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, who established a chamber ensemble that became known as the Cannons Concert at his estate in Middlesex. Though there Read more ...
James Saynor
We’ve heard of dad rock, but how about dad techno? This Spanish movie, directed by the French-born Oliver Laxe, immerses us in one of Europe’s more curious subcultures – ravers who decamp by the horde to North Africa to party day and night in the desert. But these are not a familiar Ibiza crowd: most are 30-plus, and one or two look as though they might go back to the Second Summer of Love of the late 1980s.We’re invited to join their generous vibe, backed by a battered sound system, the odd laser and enough deep bass pulsing to rattle the roof of your local Odeon. You might feel the odd curl Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Things do not look promising at 8.55 PM. Half the 1500-capacity Engine Shed is curtained off. The venue is still far from full. The crowd is mostly between their 30s and their 50s, lots of couples. The lights are on. The vibe is lacklustre. Mumbled chat and pints. It’s ex-Kasabian frontman Tom Meighan’s acoustic RAW show and it doesn’t seem likely he’ll be able to turn this around. But, within ten minutes of hitting the stage, he most certainly has.Guitarist Chris Haddon, appears first, then Meighan, a wiry, bewhiskered figure in black, cropped hair, a padlock on a chunky chain around his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Rose Wylie’s paintings are a blast of fresh air. Direct, anarchic, exuberant and determinedly daft, they make a mockery of the self-importance that so often infects the art world.Now in her nineties, she had to wait a long time before being able to spend time in the studio. Having studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, she married the artist Roy Oxlade, had three children with him and stopped painting in order to bring them up. In those days, it was normal practice for the man to be the Artist and the woman the Housekeeper while often also being his model, muse an assistant. Then Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Backstories of famous writers are fascinating: where did they come from? What were their inspirations? What obstacles did they overcome? Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new historical family drama, Bird Grove, looks at the early years of Mary Ann Evans, long before she became a novelist who published under the name of George Eliot. Yes, time to dust down your copies of Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda and so on. Produced on Hampstead Theatre’s main stage, the play stars Elizabeth Dulau, best known as Kleya Marki in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, alongside Owen Teale, Ser Alliser Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Last week I saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play which behind its pyrotechnic wit affirms that sorrow and calamity can strike chaotically at the heart of any human idyll. At first glance, the programme presented at Kings Place by the ever-resourceful Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, with Vermont-born folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and a quartet from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, looked rich in time-honoured pastoral pleasures. The launch concert for Kuusisto and Amidon’s new album Willows, on the Platoon label, it featured a string quartet arrangement (by Martin Gerigk) of Vaughan Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I don’t remember yesterday, but I remember when I was eight years old.” The opening lyrics of “Sure & Steady,” Gained / Lost’s second track, underline a core concern of UK indie stalwarts The Wave Pictures’ 20th (!) album: the passage of time, what can and cannot be remembered, what may or may not have a bearing on the here and now. A look at the images collected for the Exile On Main Street-style sleeve of Gained / Lost confirms what’s going on.Thematic considerations aside, The Wave Pictures have a fondness for American musical archetypes. Despite guitarist and singer David Tattersall’ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Amstell says this show is a departure from his previous ones, which were full of angsty introspection. And true, in I Love It Here he appears less wired, but fans fear not; this is more of the same, albeit wrapped up in positivity and some knowing self-deprecation.The show is a description of a Hollywood party he attended last year while living in Los Angeles with his partner of 14 years, and the comic seems to be in a happy place – or at least a contented one. He was relieved, he says, not being expected to “be” Simon Amstell, away from the level of fame that hosting Channel 4’s Read more ...